System to monitor foreign students

Published: Thursday, May 30, 2002

Associated Press

SAN ANTONIO (AP)  The Immigration and Naturalization Service, under pressure to keep closer tabs on foreigners in the United States, is readying a Web-based monitoring system for international students at America's colleges and other places of higher learning.

The INS demonstrated the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System on Wednesday as part of an international educators convention in San Antonio.

SEVIS, as it's known, will be released in July to replace a paper-based reporting method that INS officials acknowledge is inadequate for monitoring a foreign-student population that has grown significantly in recent years.

"Simply, we'll have real-time, accurate data on every international student in the U.S., and that is something that we don't have now," said Efren Hernandez, INS director for business and trade services in Washington.

As designed, schools will use SEVIS to report basic information about students from abroad, including country of origin, date of birth, overseas address, U.S. address, where they are studying, course of study, and English proficiency. The resulting database can be searched using a variety of filtering parameters.

Use of SEVIS will required by all schools enrolling foreign students as of Jan. 30, Hernandez said.

Hernandez says the system allows schools to alert the INS if a student stops going to class or for other reasons. It would then be up to the nearest INS office whether to investigate, depending on its priorities.

"There are great many of (students) out there and a limited number of investigating agents," he said.

The genesis of SEVIS was the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York, as one of the men involved had been enrolled at a U.S. college. But its progress was slowed by school officials, who maintained that more stringent data collection was intrusive and would hurt student recruitment overseas.

All that changed after the Sept. 11 terror attacks that brought down the World Trade Center towers, Hernandez said.

"That opposition went away after 9-11, so we've been able to devote our resources to developing the system, instead of defending our wish to develop it," he said.

NAFSA: Association of International Educators had lobbied against SEVIS, but now supports the system, albeit with some apparent pause.

Marlene Johnson, NAFSA's executive director, said INS regulations have long required schools to collect and report information on foreign students, who comprise only a small percentage of the total number of foreign nationals who come to the United States each year.

She said foreign students are being singled out for excessive attention, and pointed out that all but one of the Sept. 11 terrorists entered the country on tourist or business visas.

"What our country faces is a problem related to immigration and border security," said Johnson, a former lieutenant governor of Minnesota. "It is not, despite the headlines, a student problem. ... Legitimate international students and scholars in our country are not a security threat, they are a crucial foreign-policy asset."

Last week the U.S. Justice Department, which oversees INS, said in a report that SEVIS would not be ready by the Jan. 30 deadline, but Hernandez asserted that it would be ready on schedule.